What if they had shorted the Empire State Building by a couple of football fields?

Or gave the Great Pyramid a flattop? Or built the Eiffel Platform?

Size certainly isnâ€™t everything when it comes to buildings, of course. But the impact of many iconic structures is in their sheer stature. That is why itâ€™s so startling â€” disappointing, even â€” that the Harmon hotel, CityCenterâ€™s gateway to the Las Vegas Strip, has suddenly been cut down to about half its intended size.

Topping out at 28 stories instead of the proposed 49, the incredible shrinking Harmon seems unfortunately fated to look like a stubby, squashed stepchild next to its soaring CityCenter siblings, the 61-story Aria Resort & Casino and the 57-story Vdara condo-hotel.

That is the result of construction flaws â€” 15 floors of wrongly installed rebar â€” that forced MGM Mirage, which is developing the project with Dubai World, to rapidly call for a significant reduction of the nongaming boutique hotel. MGM Mirage canceled the Harmonâ€™s 207-unit condominium component â€” the top half of the building â€” and postponed the opening of the hotel to late 2010.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Nearly 150 years after the Civil War’s end, the South still is no Land of Lincoln.

Most states in the old Confederacy are decidedly low-key as the nation commemorates the 200-year anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, with a handful of museum exhibits and lectures among the modest events marking the occasion in the Deep South.

The national Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission encouraged states to create panels to design commemorative Lincoln events surrounding Thursday’s anniversary. Twenty-three states did so. But of the 11 states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, only Louisiana and Alabama did so, according to David Early, with the federal commission.

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